Agile is a framework designed to improve team productivity, organizational structure, and harmonize technical teams and stakeholders.

Agile has become very popular and the number one choice for small to medium-sized teams. This is mainly due to the following reasons. Firstly, its simplicity allows any team in any company to implement and adopt its tools quickly. Secondly, there are plenty of free or inexpensive tools available that support task automation.

So, why to be less agile and how?

I have led software engineers for a few years, leading small and medium-sized teams. Additionally, I have worked on both Greenfield and well-established projects. Throughout the years, I have observed that teams often adopt Agile with a good understanding of how it works but with minimal understanding of its benefits or the value it adds. As an alternative to waterfall, Agile has proven that it is possible to collect requirements, engage with stakeholders, and even create demonstrable features or functional requirements soon after the project launch. This trait of Agile has become a prevailing trend.

stakeholders loved that, as this gives them assurance that their investment is well spent, with flexibility to change direction at any given point of time. For that, agile has become a project requirement instead of being the framework for teams orchestration. This was the turning point as flexibility is taken away. Since then sprints have been bloated with meetings for three amigos, planning, refinement, retro and meetings to prepare for these meetings.

These rituals serve a purpose and having all of them, in the following themes, defeat the purpose of agile.

• Very fast-paced projects, 
• teams working in a toxic climate,
• legacy projects that require great deal or reverse engineering to unearth its prehistoric requirements before modernization.
• the discovery phase of projects where meetings create a burden on members who don’t need to be involved in every detail.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t dissect everything, but I will attempt to write another article to provide common solutions for these typical problems. However, the key takeaway here is that teams shouldn’t treat Agile rituals as mandatory but should be flexible and tailor the framework to their needs. Create effective meetings and invite key members who can contribute and add value. Let the team decide their own style and determine what works for them. Always remember that Agile cannot make decisions on behalf of your team. Agile is designed to help the team communicate their decisions.